Hiroshi Yoshikawa, Part 2

Another try to overcome hardship

Hiroshi Yoshikawa (right) working at the gymnastics venue at the Summer Olympics in Los Angeles in August 1984.

Hiroshi Yoshikawa

Born in the city of Hiroshima in 1961. After graduating from Funairi High School, he moved to the United States. He graduated from the faculty of economics at UCLA. At the age of 25, he founded a company in Hiroshima called "American Dream" to support those studying abroad and interacting with different cultures. He served as an interpreter at the Los Angeles Olympics, provided support for the effort to register the A-bomb Dome as a World Heritage site, and worked as a member of the bidding committee to bring the 2002 World CUP to Japan. In February 2010, Mr. Yoshikawa served as the chief facilitator of the 2010 APEC Junior Conference in Hiroshima.

In the summer of 1979, after I graduated from Funairi High School in Hiroshima, I enrolled at a small college of 650 students located on the east coast of the United States. I didn't study very hard to enter a university overseas; I just followed the example of another student at my high school because I thought it would be cool to study abroad.

I was optimistic about studying there and I thought I could manage it somehow, but it didn't turn out that way. At the end of my first semester, after an enrollment of four months, I was warned that I wouldn't be able to continue my studies there if I didn't receive satisfactory grades in the next semester. I then felt really homesick as I didn't like the town, which had a huge military base and wasn't a very safe place. I missed Japan and I craved Japanese rice.

That time, though, became a major turning point in my life. Up to then, I had managed to muddle through and live up to the expectations of adults without being very serious. For the first time in my life, I faced up to my difficulties. At times I nearly gave up struggling with my thick English textbooks, but again and again, I would pick up the pen I threw down.

After four months of hard work, I narrowly earned passing grades in the next semester. But I missed Japan so much that I decided to transfer to a small college in Hawaii which had many Japanese students. I was able to take advantage of the American system which permits credits completed at one school to be transferred to another. After studying there one year, I transferred again to another small college in San Francisco. Finally, the next year, I transferred once more to UCLA and majored in economics. I completed all the courses for my major and was able to graduate in two years.

They say it's difficult to graduate from UCLA, but my grades were good enough for me to graduate with honors.

In my working life, like my experience studying abroad, I failed to make a good start. In 1984, the year I graduated from college, I was hired as an interpreter for the Los Angeles Olympics. It was my first job. But on my first day of work, I was scolded roughly by a supervisor, who told me, "Get out the way, you idiot!"

Back in Japan, I first worked at a company. Then, in 1987, I founded my own company when I was 25, but I had to start with the repayment of 140 million yen. This was the debt I assumed from my father whose company went bankrupt when I was in junior high.

Later, I began working for the Asian Cup, a role that eventually led to my support role for Japan's bid for the 2002 World CUP. But on the first day of my work for the Asian Cup, a Swiss director told me, "There's nothing for you to do today, so you might as well go home." The situation upset me, and since then, I've faced a number of difficulties, including a death in my family, which made me wonder if my fate was somehow cursed. "Why do these things keep happening to me?" I thought.

But recently I've come to feel that those experiences were part of my life in order to teach me things.

Things like: "The opportunity to live is marvelous. Living means a lot of pain, but it also means appreciating the moments of joy you encounter, too, and sharing it with others." Perhaps my experiences have taught me that. Even if our efforts result in failure, it won't be the end of the world. As someone who has endured a fair share of failure, I think I have a duty to tell young people: "It's all right, try once more."